The technology blog of Neil Thompson

Something that has niggled me since I installed the first beta of IE7 was that while I could set the search provider box to something other than MSN I didn’t seem to be able to change to google.co.uk, which is what I really wanted. Why does this matter? Well notmally it doesn’t the search results from google.com will return what I am looking for quickly and easily. However, if I am looking for a product and, in particular, it’s price and availability then I want the results to be UK based – then it does matter. Actually, being English, I would like all my results to be in English and not American but that’s a different matter.

Of course a quick Google provided the answer of how you can write your own code to change the search provider. It’s pretty simple and full details can be found here. But essentially you have to write a short xml file to contain details of the new provider. The one I wrote for google.co.uk looks like:

Then all you need to do is open the file from the browser and the easiest way to do so is to provide a button like the one below. You will be asked to confirm that you want to change the provider and that’s all there is to it. If you want to change your search provider to google.co.uk just click the button below – you can always change it back through the options.